


Separation

by lost_spook



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Assignment Six, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-08
Updated: 2012-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-30 19:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Separate them, Steel had said.</i>  Sapphire, Silver, Steel; a moment in Assignment 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Separation

**Author's Note:**

> Mild spoilers for mid-Assignment 6. Also, if warnings are needed for a painfully obvious poetry quote, then...

Something is broken; she has broken something. She can feel an approaching threat, an inescapable fate closing in, and she is alone.

Separate them, Steel had said, but quietly it is they who have been separated. She can see that now, and it is a piece of knowledge that falls on her as a frost.

Silver is in sight, but her suspicion has put him out of her reach, and her doubts linger. Steel is her surety, but she cannot see him nor sense him. She is alone, separate, silent.

There are human words she has picked up once before that echo now in her mind: 

_Out flew the web and floated wide;  
The mirror crack’d from side to side:  
“The curse is come upon me…”_

Sapphire only feels the coldness of space closing in around her.

*

They can’t get out without him, so he will wait, Silver thinks. So can they, until _he_ is ready, now that they have closed their minds against him, and left him on the outside. What is it the humans say? They have such expressive phrases – out of the loop, left out in the cold, and talked about behind his back. All he has done is what he was made to do; he did not ask to be sent. 

And there _is_ something else here; a darkness, a gathering sense of danger. He knows it, and he is afraid; more than he cares to admit as he waits and watches, and pretends that he isn't. He isn’t an operative; he isn’t brave and calm and forceful in the face of threats. He must rely on them for that. And he cannot be sure, not from here, that the darkness isn’t in the other two. It has been known before. It will be again. He doesn’t believe it of Sapphire or Steel, but he can’t be certain. They are a mystery to each other. In that lies the fascination, and also the fear. 

Silver ignores the humans (if humans they are; things are growing stranger here) and finds a teaspoon to occupy his mind – a teaspoon has the potential to become a myriad other, more interesting things in his hands. 

He can wait. They can’t get out without him. 

The flipside of the coin, that he won’t even let his mind glance at, is that he’s almost sure the reverse is true this time.

*

Steel walks outside in the gloom. There is something here – someone, or somebody; he can’t be sure. He follows the sounds, but sees nothing different anywhere. 

He pauses, thinking of Silver and Sapphire, and what has been said. He has learned to be guided by her instincts, but he is slow to give his trust and does not take it back lightly. There is something else; he feels irritably aware of it, but can make out nothing more. He doesn’t have the same sensitivity to these things that Sapphire has – Silver, too, in his own way. 

And now, when he tries to find the other two in his thoughts, they are no longer there. In this strange place, there is only the silence, and the night that has no time of its own.

Steel is not prone to fears and fancies. He takes the prosaic route – back inside to find them.


End file.
